


Darkness When I'm Dreaming

by Linden



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Pre-Series, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-24
Updated: 2014-08-24
Packaged: 2018-02-14 12:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2191887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linden/pseuds/Linden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean dreamed of fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授权翻译】Darkness When I'm Dreaming/梦中的暗](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4850903) by [Milfoil_c](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milfoil_c/pseuds/Milfoil_c)



> This is the smallest of small things, and wandered into my head because I think Dean needs a) more hugs and b) someone to take care of him now and again. An eleven-year-old Sam seemed a likely candidate for both. 
> 
> The title hails from Gregory Alan Isakov's _3 AM_.

**March 1995**

 

Dean dreamed of fire.

He was in a house, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure of it; everything was burning, and there was so much smoke, and it was so very hard to see. But even so, he could tell the place was—it was _wrong_ , somehow, its doors and corners at odd angles, floors slanted, a mirror cracked, picture frames turned and nailed face-wise to the walls. There was a nameless desperation twisting in his gut as he ran. He was looking for something, for someone ( _MomDadSammyMomDadSammySammySammySammySam_ ), but between one breath and the next he kept forgetting precisely what, or who, or why, and as he shot from room to room there was fire crawling along the floorboards and up the walls, and ceilings falling in burning pieces at his back, and the heat was beating at him like a hundred great buffeting wings.

A door loomed up in front of him suddenly—ten feet tall, twenty, thirty. It blew open, soundlessly, as he touched it, and he tumbled through it into a nursery aflame.  The crib was sheeted in fire and the mobile above it spinning in trails of sparks, and it hit him, then, where he was, _when_ he was, but he couldn’t find the breath he needed to scream. Because this wasn’t just a house; it was _his_ house, his family’s house, abandoned ten and a half years ago in Lawrence, and there was something terrible above him on the ceiling, and he knew it, and invisible hands were forcing his head back to make him look, all the same. And he didn’t want to, he _didn’t want to_ , because he knew what he was going to see, knew what was already falling warm and wet into his hair, splattering across his shoulders, now across his forehead, his face, his mouth—but it wasn’t his mother he found pinned above him. It was Sammy, _Sammy_ , his skinny arms and legs starfished against the ceiling and blood dripping from his stomach, and as fire rushed toward him from the corners of the walls he was weeping and screaming _Dean_.

Dean came awake on a choked gasp, jolting half upright in bed with his heart jackhammering in his chest.

It took him a long, desperate moment to figure out where in the fuck he was ( _not on fire not on fire nothing on fire SAM SAM SAMMY_ ), but the alien shapes around him resolved soon enough into the familiar shadows of a motel room at night: TV and dresser, walls and drapes and a neat pile of duffels, dim light spilling out from the bath, the clock blinking 1:49. Their father was still asleep in the bed closest to the door, sprawled on his back and breath huffing soft and steady; he’d been up for two days before crashing a few hours before, and nothing short of a bomb blast was going to wake him before morning. Sam, all sleepy and soft, was just stirring on the other side of their double bed, knuckling at his eyes like a little kid, and the relief that flooded through Dean at seeing him—safe, _here_ , close enough to touch; small and sweet and so fucking fragile that Dean’s chest ached with the knowledge of it—was as strong as a winter tide. ‘Dean?’ Sam murmured, yawning. ‘Dean, wha’ is it?’

It took Dean another moment to realize that he was shaking, violently, and that the soft clattering sound he kept hearing was his own teeth chattering, as though with cold. Sam was blinking at him, gaze sharpening as he woke entirely up. ‘Dean, are you okay?’

‘Yeah.’ His voice came out on a shaky rasp; he cleared his throat, swallowed, tried again. ‘Yeah. ‘m fine, Sammy, sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you up.’ He eased himself down onto his back, closed his eyes, snapped them open again almost immediately when he found the memory of Sam, bloody and burning, waiting for him in the dark. He rolled onto his side, facing the door, so that he wasn’t looking at the ceiling, pulled in several deep, quiet breaths through his nose, blew them out through his mouth. Couldn’t stop the shaking. ‘Go back to sleep, all right?’ His voice was still unsteady. ‘We only got a few hours before Dad’s gonna want us on the road.’

Sam was quiet for several heartbeats, then, softly, hesitantly: ‘Dean? Did—did you have a bad dream?’

Dean swallowed, breathed. Tried to get his heart to stop pounding. ‘Sammy, go back to sleep,’ he said.

The mattress creaked and dipped a moment later. Dean thought, briefly, that Sam was rolling over to curl up in his nest of blankets again, but suddenly there was a warm little body pressing tentatively up against him, all sharp elbows and bony knees. Sam curled up against his back, silently, and wrapped a skinny arm around his ribs, tucked his nose against the soft skin behind Dean’s ear and spread a hand across his sternum, rubbed a thumb gently back and forth, once, twice—all of it a timid imitation of the way Dean had been cradling his little brother all his life, whenever Sam had woken sad or sick or scared and needed comfort. And Dean would have laughed at the utter absurdity of being spooned by his baby brother, he really would have—Sammy was more than a foot shorter than he was, for Chrissakes—but he was so fucking _grateful_ for it that his throat had closed up too tight for him to make a sound. Sam didn’t say anything about Dean’s silence, or the tremors still wracking Dean’s body, or the sweat Dean was sure the kid could feel drying on his skin; he just settled comfortably in and wrapped himself around him, warm and whole and safe and _breathing_ , and after a minute Dean brought a hand up to grip his little brother’s, tugged their twined hands up to fold against his chest. Sam tightened his arm around him, just a little, pressed a kiss, shyly, against the top of his spine, warm and petal-soft. The imprint of his mouth lingered on Dean’s skin, tingling, comforting, long after Sam had fallen back asleep.

It was nearly 3:00 before Dean dozed off again, but when he did it was to the reassuring _thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump_ of his little brother’s heartbeat against his back, and the warmth of Sam’s small hand in his.

 


	2. Two

Sam was up, and John in the shower, and the scent of coffee in the air, when Dean woke a second time. The visceral panic of his nightmare was still lingering in his gut—he could feel it, twisting, as he swam back to full consciousness and _remembered_ , his eyes snapping open—but the ceiling overhead was reassuringly empty, and he could see Sammy across the room, barefoot in old jeans and a battered SPACE CAMP tee that was two sizes too big for him, but which the little geek had loved too much to leave at Goodwill where they’d found it. It was still dark outside, sunrise not even a glimmer on the horizon, and with the dim table lamp glowing and the heat whirring softly from the vents, it seemed almost cozy, their room, almost welcoming, and Dean let himself imagine, just for a second, that he was really home—that he was waking up in his room in a real house; that his parents were downstairs cooking breakfast in a real kitchen with a stove and a coffee maker and . . . and _placemats_ and shit; that there was a dog, maybe, hoping for bacon; that Sammy had just come tumbling in to complain that Mom and Dad wouldn’t let him start on his Lucky Charms—no, oatmeal; no, _pancakes_ —until Dean got up and came downstairs to have breakfast with him. The illusion crumbled soon enough, of course. Always did. A real home, his home, wouldn’t have wallpaper peeling so badly away from the water damage on the wall, wouldn’t have that vaguely nauseating smell of cheap airspray and old cigarettes, and Sammy in his geeky tee was just heating water for instant coffee this morning in their hotpot, not wailing about pancakes. But it was sweet to pretend anyway, for the few heartbeats that it lasted.

Sam looked around as Dean stirred and sat up, slowly, muscles aching. ‘Hey,’ his little brother said, hair sticking up in six different directions around his face, and Dean couldn’t help but smile, because the kid looked like a freakin’ sleepy porcupine, seriously. ‘Coffee’ll be ready in a minute.’

Dean scrubbed a hand across his face, yawned, tried to will away his tiredness, and the lingering horror of last night’s dream, and the burning ache across his shoulders and back from getting thrown halfway across a graveyard yesterday evening, courtesy of Casper the Decidedly Unfriendly and Actually Really Fuckin' Grumpy Ghost. He had no luck with any of those three goals, but he’d at least managed to swing his legs sideways and get his feet on the floor by the time Sam shuffled over to stick a blessedly caffeinated Styrofoam cup beneath his nose, and he drank off a quarter of it in a gulp, burned his mouth a little, didn’t much care. Leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees and his head in one hand, holding the warm cup to his temple with the other. Jesus, he felt like shit.

‘Dad wants us ready to go by five thirty,’ Sam said softly, apologetically, and Dean glanced at the clock and sighed. 5:17. _Damn it_. ‘Said we’d stop for breakfast soon as we found a place serving it, though.’ His voice turned hopeful. ‘Think there might be a Waffle House?’

Sore and tired as he was, Dean tilted his head back to quirk another smile up at him anyway. The kid had started an intense love affair with pecan-waffles-with-peanut-butter when he’d been about five years old, the first time John had taken them to a Waffle House in Louisiana, and he was still going strong. ‘Dude. We’re in Kentucky. There’s gonna be like six,’ he said, and Sam smiled back at him, dimples deep and sweet. He was still standing close enough that Dean could catch the familiar scent of cheap detergent and cheaper motel soap and, beneath both, the salty sweetness of Sam’s warm skin; he reached out his free hand, unthinking, to grip his little brother's hip for a minute and smooth a thumb across the bone, just wanting the reassurance of touch. The seventeenth rule of being a Winchester (right after  _never pay more the ten dollars for jeans at Goodwill_ and just before _don't bother Bobby while he's cooking_ ) was that they rarely talked about nightmares, and Sam didn’t say a word now about Dean’s, but there was something open and sweet and worried in his face, all the same.

‘Dean, you okay?’ he asked, softly.

‘Yeah.’ Dean cleared his throat. ‘Yeah I’m good, kiddo.’ He squeezed Sam’s hip, once, hard, and then let him go, because he _was_ good, at least as far as Sammy was concerned; it wasn’t ever his little brother’s responsibility to take care of him, even if Dean had been so exhausted and frightened that he’d let himself forget that last night. Levering himself to his feet, he ruffled Sam’s hair, which earned him a whack and a bitchface, as he knew it would; he grinned, shuffled over to his duffel, and poked about in it as he drank off the rest of his coffee. Clean underwear, it seemed, was clearly too ambitious a dream for today, but jeans and a shirt he could do. Yawning, he shucked off his sleep pants and tee and slid bare into his oldest jeans—ripped in one knee and low on his hips but still his favorite of the few things he owned—ran some deodorant over his armpits and then pulled a battered grey tee on over his head and called it a day. ‘Remind me we have to hit a laundromat later,’ he said, buttoning up his fly as he turned, and found Sammy’s eyes snapping away from him and a blush blooming prettily up his neck and over his cheeks. Befuddled, Dean had his mouth open to ask what was wrong when the bathroom door creaked open, and he looked around to find their father coming into their small room in jeans and a tee, with a towel over his head as he scrubbed at his wet hair. ‘You boys almost ready?’ he asked, voice muffled.

The three of them were tossing their bags in the trunk seven minutes later, Sam still a little flushed and refusing to meet his gaze, Dean ruminating on the unpleasant flavor combination toothpaste and coffee had left in his mouth and the general weirdness of baby brothers, and half an hour after that Dean had a short stack of pancakes in his stomach and was wheedling a piece of pecan pie from the dinner menu out of Annie the Motherly Waffle House waitress, while John rolled his eyes and Sam tucked happily into his second serving of pecan waffles with peanut butter. (Dean suspected that those waffles weren’t going to be turning up on their bill; Annie had fallen prey to Sammy’s sweet little-boy smile and quiet ‘yes, ma’am, they’re my favorite’ before Dean had ever turned on the charm.) As she went off to the kitchen to find him contraband breakfast pie, he tipped his head back against the booth and watched his little brother, felt his nightmare image of Sammy dying on a ceiling gradually being crowded out by this one: Sam nattering happily on about some book he was reading, offering their father a bite of his waffles and then laughing as he tried to fend him off with a fork when John raised an eyebrow at the taste and went for another, knocking his foot idly against Dean’s leg beneath the table, holding forth on the superiority of pecan waffles to pecan pie (to pie,  _pie_ , because the kid was a heathen, obviously, and also clearly cracked in the head). His hair was still sticking up in six different directions and he had a little smear of peanut butter now at the corner of his mouth, and it scared the crap out of Dean, sometimes, how very fiercely he loved him, how . . . how _necessary_ Sammy was.

Sam was looking at him now, curiously, forkful of waffles arrested halfway to his mouth, and Dean wondered how much of what he'd been thinking had been showing in his face.

He blew a straw wrapper at his little brother across the table. Sam _dodged_ it, the little fucker, and earned an approving laugh from their father; and outside the day was breaking quietly over another town and across another stretch of blacktop—the light pulling them east, toward the sun.


End file.
